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I never want to have the country send their “thoughts and prayers” to Schuylkill County for the loss of our kids. I know you don’t, either.

So let’s talk about this us-ing common sense like adults. No politics. No red. No blue.

I’m a gun owner with a license to carry. I would like to be the first to stand in line to protect the rights to buy firearms to defend our families or simply for gaming. I’m all for that. I’m all for the Second Amendment.

I’m also a father of two little girls who attend elementary school in Schuylkill County. We now live in Orwigsburg but originally had moved to Pottsville from Michigan.

You’ll remember a few years back we had a scary moment when John S. Clarke Elementary had a bomb threat by someone who didn’t want to be convicted of some petty crime — at the time, it was real! So I, like many other parents, left our work hysterically as we heard about this bomb threat on Facebook, and drove to the school to make sure our kids were safe.

My older daughter was at the elementary school. I was relieved to see our local and state police had barricaded and secured the elementary school. I then quickly drove to the preschool where my younger daughter was attending down the street to make sure they were safe. All was fine there, but since there was no security guard and mostly female teachers on-site, I decided to stand outside the preschool for the rest of the day until everyone went home once school was out safely.

I remember at least five or six bomb threats that year in Pottsville schools. All parents were always promptly alerted by the school system and proper precautions were taken by schools every time.

Later in 2017, we moved to Orwigsburg, and sure enough more bomb threats in our local schools. This time not at the school where my girls attended but too close for comfort nevertheless. I had become numb to it — we all had. The numbness went away after hearing about yet another school massacre in Florida. Seventeen lives lost, 17 souls departed before their time.

It is real again. Forty-plus school shootings in 2018 alone made it real again. My wife was reluctant to take the kids to school after hearing about the Florida massacre.

I was born in Pakistan, lived in Canada then moved to the U.S. I have traveled the world. I have never heard, seen or experienced this many school shootings anywhere around the world. I have been to war-stricken countries, Third World countries riddled with crime and countries with extremely high unemployment rates but have never heard of this many school shootings in any other country.

So, why us? Do we just have bad luck? Do we have the craziest crazy people than anywhere else in the world? Do we need more guns to protect ourselves? These are some questions that come to mind.

Here are the changes we need to make to reduce these massacres committed by gun:

We need tougher laws on who gets firearms. Period. It is absolutely absurd and irresponsible of us to think that our current gun laws of who gets a gun and who doesn’t are working. If our kids are being massacred in their schools with guns, then our current laws are not working.

We need to have a mental aptitude test for anyone who wants to buy a gun. This test cannot be a Mickey Mouse test that can be filled out on the side of a counter and given a pass if there is nothing glaringly obvious about a person’s mental state. Rather, this test should be prepared and evaluated by comprehensive research that utilizes our most advance ingenuity that can raise red flags according to the answers provided by the applicant. These aptitude tests exist for businesses when they are hiring employees to see the type of employee they are getting, so they can definitely be created for who gets a deadly weapon and who doesn’t.

We need mandatory gun safety training for all gun holders. This will not only teach the proper way of hand-ling a firearm and give the person more confidence, but also reduce the number of accidental gun-related injuries and fatalities in our households.

We do not need military-style firearms in the hands of civilians. In a civilized society where the rule of law prevails, no citizen should have the need to have a firearm that has the ability to rapid fire. Rapid fire, by definition, is designed for offensive at-tacks not defensive protection.

There are many other points to consider, but at the moment let’s start here by demanding these basic gun laws change from our Congress men/women and the people we put in power. As a reality check at the moment, to protect our helpless children from future massacres, we are doing nothing.

Please, no “thoughts and prayers” for our kids!

Mohammed LoneOrwigsburg

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